How to help newbies financially?

One way of heading off the "idealists" is to avoid making a stay a condition of payment. If the person has a choice in where they spend their time between payments, then you've removed the straight traffic-buying aspect.
You do actually get traffic, but it's traffic resulting form people choosing to remain on you place without being obliged to do so.


The other aspect of this sort of system is that it bypasses Search. Visitors are arriving via the credit/LM pairs. It's a completely separate vector - and it could be used by a lot of people.
There is a kinda/sorta search element in that the system has to be able to feed people a start location where they can go to begin clicking devices.
There could be Themes in this as others have suggested.

I'd see the handout of the locations as being driven randomly (within themes if necessary), but with credit/location pairs being weighted by the time they have been in the system.
That would allow a tiny operation to buy say 10 credits and be sure that their pairs would not be swamped forever in a completely random lottery by the heavy hitters who might buy thousands.

There is an element of traffic buying in it, but that is offset by allowing choice. The better places will tend to attract more time spent.

There would also be an element of self-regulation in the system.
Let's say that someone buys 10,000 credits. That will result in 10,000 LM's being handed out, and could well result in 10,000 visits.
If their place is crap, then the visitors might well just fly straight out.
If their place is crap, and the person has already been there, they might not even visit. They might just go looking for another place from the Hud.
There could be a law of diminishing returns for the heavy hitters in this.

Plus: A few people might buy 10,000, but thousands of people might buy 10.

On the other hand, if these visitors are solely interested in waiting for the time interval regardless of the place in which they are waiting, then the system works for the crap place.


There are compromises. Things will never be prefect. We should always try to achieve it though.
I'm not a "fundamentalist" "idealist"

As I wrote the previous post, I was thinking, "which brings us back to Sling's poool of funds", but it requires trust in a stranger. Only LL or a single avatar can hold money, and LL isn't going to do it, which leaves us with a single avatar - a stranger to almost everyone. My preference is for cone owners to make the payments, and think up ways of finding any rogues.


I have to go out for lunch right now and I won't have time to consider the rest of your post until later.

I guess I'm not seeing that. What the system does to keep track of participants' comings and goings within the sim is pretty much local to that sim's cone, I would think, and would be that way irrespective of the "pay to stay" policy in force.

The backend processing is nonetheless daunting at scale, even for the simplest form of this, so it's certainly valid that LL would be a good choice of host. But as we all know, snowballs in hell. Moreover, after initial implementation, this is something that will want decisive changes over time, and we know LL has problems with that--just witness Search ranking, for example.

I guess I'm somewhat of a pessimist when it comes to this sort of thing. I've never appreciated the idea of paying people to sit around in camping chairs, or the idea of giving away free Lindens from money trees, or necessarily the core idea of giving away money for any reason.

Does any of this actually improve new user retention prospects? That to me is the ultimate goal. That's why I like the idea of "freebies" if we're going to give something away. Free house, some furniture, a plant here and there, and the new Resident will quickly figure out that they're going to have to get themselves some land. They may rent, or they may purchase mainland. Either way, *that* is when they become a contributor to the economy, and it won't take long before they start itching for a bigger piece of land (Elanthius), a better house (Porky) and better stuff to put in the house (Phil, et al). This is the "conversion" we should hope for, and find effective ways to encourage.

Linden Lab is certainly not going to get behind any concept that perpetuates giving away Lindens. They want people to purchase Lindens via their exchange. I want people to purchase Lindens via their exchange, or any other exchange. The folks who roam the grid scraping chump change out of free money systems aren't going to be your customers. They will become customers only when they obtain land, and start buying currency through the exchanges. I seriously doubt that free money systems do anything at all to encourage this.

NCI is successful at converting new users into long term Residents because of the social and community aspects of the effort. If they never gave away a single Linden, I wouldn't be hard pressed to believe they'd see roughly the same conversion rate. People who don't see value in anything beyond scavenging Lindens aren't going to be convinced to do anything but scavenge Lindens.

Is it Friday yet?

Tim

But i do the make the payments. You pay the machine the amount....but it does not deduct it from my account....it has an equal debit and credit entry!

Date: 05/25/2009 07:18:23
Payment
Description: Traffic Cone 2.805, Plush Enigma (33, 66, 21)
Region: Plush Enigma
Source: Rene Erlanger
L$30 L$30 L$43,554 L$43,554

If no one uses it....i lose nothing in terms of cost. When someone uses it , you get the following entries :

Date: 05/25/2009 07:41:01
Object Pays
Region: Plush Enigma
Destination: Jan Maroon
L$1 L$44,301

68 1642937058 Date: 05/25/2009 07:41:01
Object Pays
Region: Plush Enigma
Destination: Gerit Kira
L$2 L$44,302

Umm, not really. When they buy or rent land is when they start contributing to LL's bottom line in some appreciable way, but everything spent on tier and the vast majority of everything spent on rent leaks directly out of the SL economy into LL. As it happens, that more or less coincides with when folks get in the habit of prying open their wallets for SL, but it would be a hell of a lot better for the economy if they could just wait a few years before settling into a place of their own.

Freebies, meh. There are plenty of them, and they're available everywhere. For that matter, what difference does it even make whether they're any good or not? Newbies will always be drawn to freebies, but they wouldn't know a Muism frock, an SSL skin, nor an Abiss couch if it fell off the truck on them.

No, until they learn to pry open their wallets, what every newbie wants is L$s, and they want those L$s enough to go to some real effort to collect. The problem is finding some way to harness that unskilled labor into something of value.

A newbie getting a box of freebies is like the 8 year old under the Christmas tree with a gift of socks: the occasion demands display of gratitude, but there's not a lot of celebration inside.

+++

On a completely different topic: When I was worried about "trust" issues associated with a centralized payer, I wasn't concerned with merchants distrusting that payer. Think about it: as it is now, by owning the cones and granting them debit permission, those merchants are putting a lot more at risk than they would be by just paying a central operator. (Rather, I was fussing about another flavor of scripts trusting scripts: how can the central operator know for sure that this message saying to pay a recipient really came from an authorized script, whether that script is in a "cone" or HUD or both? There are approaches to that problem, but all have some drawbacks--especially if one wants to make the objects mod-perm, or even more challenging: open source.)

+++

One important thing that must not be lost if going to a centralized payment approach: the merchant-viewable transaction record of which recipients got paid. Such a centralized system would have to reliably supply that data to merchants in a format at least as palatable as the transaction records are now.

That's totally way off base and if read Jack's blog you'd know that. Campers who earn their money that way ...spend it the same way in other locations. It circulates existing money supply from A to B to C.....if that didn't happen you would purely have to rely on people purchasing Linden dollars from Lindex or 3rd party sites. As of Jan 2009 less than 10% of the Userbase had Payment on file with their SL a/c....you could probably add a percent or two that are NPIOF but purchase Lindens through other 3rd party providers.
Instead of having fluid money supply through movement, you'd have a more stagnant money supply. I know this from the campers in my own little Group...of which 2 are Shop owners. They spend that earnt money, they use it to pay shop rents, they use it to pay for land rents too (small plots i presume)....that money circulates

The Grid is awash with quality Freebies, that damages the Content economy in the long term more than paying campers a few Lindens!

Ok, you pay yourself that amount, via the cone, and the cone notches up credits for that amount. If you then want to empty your account, you can and the system will merrily send people along, who won't get paid. Or you use an alt as the owner of the cone. You give the money to the alt, the alt pays it to itself via the cone, which notches up some system credits and then returns the money to you. The system happily send people to you under the assumption that they'll get paid - when they won't.

Qie...forgive me, but i don't see a problem with the Cone payment system...maybe i'm missing something.

When i top up the Cone with say 300 L, it doesn't get deducted from my account then and there...as shown in my previous message. It shows up in transaction history as an equal debit and credit.....at that stage i haven't paid anything.

Its only when the Cone user comes along and touches the Cone by which after 11 mins elapses...I make a 2 L payment to the user...and 1 L payment to the creator (Jan)

I think we're overcomplicating things...because i don't see the potential fraud from using the Cone as it stands......yes i have to accept "Debit Permission", but its hardly stripping away my account balance.

That's very true.

I wouldn't have thought that that's a problem that is difficult to solve. Scripts can't intercept inter-script communications, even if the scripts are in the same prim, and scripts aren't sent to the user's computer, so they can't be examined that way. I would think that a simple code, perhaps changed periodically (daily, for instance), would secure the communications.

??
Empty the account..what for? If the account is empty with 0 Lindens , the Cone goes offline...excluded from the network....no more visitors......defeats the object of using it!You switch it back on again by buying credits? The Credits are gradually used up by the incoming visitors.

I think you all are getting to deep into the "what if" scenarios to what is actually quite a simplistic system. I'm not sure where the scam arises.....you mean by accepting "Debit Permissions", the Cone Creator could empty my account?

No. You pay into the cone, but you actually pay yourself - the cone never has any money - it can't have money. All the cone does is keep track of the number of L$s that you pay yourself, and the number of L$s that you should have paid to those who earned it, and it assumes that you'll pay those who earn it. If you empty your avatar's account you won't pay anyone, but the system thinks you will, and it will keep sending people to you until the number runs down to zero, even though none of them get paid.

Ahh....i get you, my main account or Alt account has zero balance to pay anyone.

To be honest, things must get pretty desperate for anyone in SL, to worry about paying bunches of 2L's and 1 L's.............the fact that you're unable to pay the Creator too...might mean he takes you off the network permanently. The only loser will be the Cone owner.....stuck with a cone that can't do anything.

Doesn't this same law apply to 1000's of Zyngo machines, Sploders, camping chairs and any other gadget that promises to make a payment.? Business or participation is based on "trust"

My thought was that the scripts would absolutely be NoMod. The object itself could be Mod if it were to fit into the ambience of its location - althogh it would be helpful to keep the appearance to a recognisable set of versions.
In a design in which a landowner buys credits through the device, a the UUID could be associated with those credits. A valid request to pay an avatar could only come from a device that has unused credits associated with it. Some sort of passphrase might be better than a UUID if a parcel owner had to rez a new version of the device while there were still credits in the central pool.





Does the merchant actually have to know the identities of the recipients?
The merchant is buying x credits from the central service, and that is the transaction on their own account.
A list would be useful to match against visitors against.
It would help to answer questions like - "X credits and LMs have been handed out. How many of those actually visited?" and "How many came back again?"


BUT.....

This thought raises a BIGGIE for a central system if it logs who exactly went where.
What you are looking at is a database of profiles and activity.
You know what they are interested in if the system allows people to follow themes.
You know where they were when they click.
If people are using some sort of hud, you can track them everywhere.

Oooooh! Who to trust with all of this money and information?

Now that's something that I'd forgotten - the payment to the creator The system could check that it receives a payment when a person is supposed to receive theirs. Yep - I think that would do it. I wonder if something like that is incorporated into the cones.

It brings us back to the creator getting paid every time a user gets paid, which means, at 2L per payment, a third of everything that the cone owner pays out goes to the creator. It's still a huge percentage. There are ways to reduce it, such as periodically paying some back.

That's the case whether the payment is central or local. It's the case with the cones right now.

At first thought, I don't see a problem with someone having that information.

well you could ask for a system that pays 6 L to a visitors to stay for 33 mins and pays the Creator 1 L......that would be nearer 16% Commission. Nahh......33 mins in anyone place and i'd be extremely bored. I don't like shopping that much!

hehe. It would also be nearer to camping

Right, there's not anything wrong, really. I mean it's working fine. In *theory* the creator could suck down your entire L$ balance, but in fact that's not happening (and it surely wouldn't be a good long-term business strategy for him ). The "trust" problem with the way it works now is that the central operator has to trust that the cones aren't lying about paying out L$s--and the only way it can really know if a payment has happened is by watching the creator's transaction history to see if he got his cut when the payment was claimed to occur. (Well... and that the payment received came from the same object that supposedly paid out to the cone-following resident, and probably other stuff I'm not thinking about.)

I don't mean to raise a big issue about the payment scheme, really. But I'll bet that there's not currently anybody watching the till to make sure the cones are actually paying out, even though a web-bot could be verifying against transaction history, as mentioned above.

In aggregate, I'm sure camping money amounts to something substantial. Individually, it's chump change, and hardly an "income" capable of sustaining any sort of premium experience in terms of land and content quality. You'd have to spend all your time camping. Many do. What do they have to show for it? What do content creators have to show for it? Again, you can look at all these millions of micro transactions as a whole and tell one story. Examining them on an individual basis tells quite a different one. At best, content creators who pay out camping money might get that money back, and break even, but even that's doubtful.

People are placing much too much importance on camping and other "free money" schemes in the overall economy. It's nonsense.

On freebies, I am not suggesting nor do I support flooding the freebie market with premium content.. that's obviously counter productive. I'm speaking of the type of freebie content that you typically find in the library folders. It's fun for a while, but leaves you wanting more. So you pony up $10 for enough Lindens to buy the premium stuff.

OK...I sent an alt out last night to use this for a couple of hours....and I have a few concerns. It's ok to discuss those here? I mean, I bought 3 of the things and am giving the creator some business....so it's cool to go ahead and discuss some concerns?

not really...if its 1 visitor at any single instance.....it still means a max of 1440 traffic units generated by that cone for a single day....although i would prefer 131 visitors (max) than say 43/44

If the cone pays to an object that's owned by the creator, couldn't a script in that object verify that a payment is made, or is there no way for that object to 'know' about it? If the owner's cut is paid to an object, and the object can be aware of the payment, then there is no problem in discovering non-paying cones.

That would only be so if the cone sent new clickers to other places immediately - as it does now - or only allows them to stay in the same place when the cone isn't handling someone else at the time, or if it doesn't accept new clickers when it's handling someone. The consenses here seems to be that we don't want new clickers (our shoppers) to be sent somewhere else immediately.

Please do discuss them here. We are trying to evaluate the cones for our own use, and also trying to come up with a system that we'd like - whether or not one ever gets made. So, from both aspects, we need to know about current concerns.